CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Ozdemir, Ezgican |
|---|---|
| Title | Kemalist Tattooing: Distinctive Ink and Reproduction of the Secular in Contemporary Turkey |
| Summary | This thesis focuses on the practice of tattooing Atatürk symbolisms in contemporary Turkey. A practice that embodies and communicates the prominent state ideology of Kemalism, tattooing as a body modification, today is perceived as a practice that distinguishes subjects and indicates group or identity affiliation. The human body then, is utilized as a mediator of the individual’s identity formation. Kemalist tattoos in Turkey thus, communicate citizens’ Kemalist sentiments and embody the demarcation between two identities of Kemalists/secularists and Islamists. Apart from such incorporation to a certain group, Kemalist tattoos are manifestations of Turkish citizens’ particular understandings of their own social, political, and gendered subjectivities. Basing my research on an ethnographic field method, I first lay out the practice of Kemalist tattooing through the perspectives of tattoo artists, in order to demonstrate that Kemalist tattoos, according to their practitioners, harm the status of tattooing in the field of art. With this, I then move on to tattoo bearers and their positionalities within the practice. But more importantly, I argue that Kemalism, through these bodily inscriptions, as a social category among Turkish citizens, reifies other highly disputed and problematic categories like ethnicity, femininity, masculinity, and religiosity, which shapes people’s understandings of identity-making and politics in Turkey. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Rabinowitz, Dan |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/ozdemir_ezgican.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University